Saturday was an incredible day for Easton wrestling. I know most people have not followed the ups and downs, but after being pretty much invincible from 1948 to 2016, Easton wrestling had fallen to a pretty dark place following the retirement of Steve Powell. Powell was in a long line of Easton coaches who were Hall of Fame level good, from Gust Zarnas to Charlie Bartolet to John Maitland to Bob Zarbatany to Dave Crowell to Powell, Easton had strung together six straight coaches who were either in the state or national wrestling hall of fame. Hire seven, Easton legend Jamarr Billman (two-time state champion, three time All American), seemed fantastic on paper and was absolutely doomed from the start. The next four years were marked by in-fighting, transfers, a very high profile assault of Billman at the state tournament, student and community protests over Billman’s initial firing, another near brawl at a transfer eligibility hearing, private security getting hired for Billman at home matches after threats to his safety, a federal lawsuit over doctored evaluation scores that led to Billman winning a six-figure judgment against the district, the termination of Easton administrators, including assistant superintendent Alyssa Emili. It was a broken program.
Jody Karam came out of retirement in 2020 to save his alma mater. Karam, captain and state medalist on the 1983 state championship team, had been the head coach at Delaware Valley (NJ) and Liberty for 29 seasons, and amassed over 400 dual meet wins. He is a no-nonsense, buck-stops-here guy who was just the right person to take Easton wrestling by the lapels and pull it back from the brink. No parent factions were going to run over Jody, he commanded respect in every room he walked into, and he had a plan. He never intended to be back in coaching long (he’s in his 60s, he’d retired from teaching and coaching) but he was going to get Easton back to where it should be before he left. With his wrestles when he was hired, he laid out his four year plan - about as long as he expected to have the job - where he guaranteed that in their careers they would beat Nazareth, Northampton, Bethlehem Catholic, and Phillipsburg, and make a trip back to state duals.
I wrote on this site at the time (January 2022) –
“There's a way forward in wrestling. I think Jody Karam is really good. They don't have a lot of talent this year, and have less experience (it's one senior) but there are some tangible improvements, and the pipeline isn't dry. [The] transfers out aren't on the current staff/situation, and are signs that the feeder program isn't bare, there was just a generation of kids that went somewhere else. Mission #1 for Jody and his staff is to hold onto Easton kids, because they're coming…[T]he issue facing Jody and company isn't to build back a program from scratch with no talent, it's keeping that talent home.”
Easton had been bleeding talent, losing a state champ and eight state medalists in the four years since Powell retired. Besides exercising his Jody Karam super-power (taking average kids and making them good), he needed to win over and hang onto the elite talent that came out of the Easton developmental pipelines, but wasn’t going to Easton. Target #1 was a seventh grader named Nick Salamone, who was very good and very like to end up at Bethlehem Catholic or Notre Dame. There was very targeted and specific outreach, both from Karam and from his chosen assistant – two-time state champion and NCAA qualifier from Central Michigan and Penn State, Corey Keener – to at least get Salamone to join the Easton Junior High team rather than just wrestle club as an 8th grader. Which worked. Again, in the same post I quoted above, I wrote: “Nicholas Salamone is an 8th grader who is currently wrestling for the Junior High program who I did not anticipate to come to Easton, but now looks like he'll stay - he'll be a JH Districts finalist and PJW state medalist most likely and will start right away next year. They haven’t kept a kid like him in forever.”
Salamone and his family gave the program and it’s coaches a shot. When Easton put heavyweight Matt Cruise into finals that year, it was at least a seed that elite kids could reach their goals in Easton. I don’t know if they believed, but they at least felt good enough about what Easton could do for his development that, despite a lot of breath holding on the Red Rover side, Salamone enrolled at Easton in the fall of 2022.
When Jody announced before the season that he was retiring, he’d accomplished almost all he set out to do. In that same post, I mentioned the slew of 7th graders Easton had coming “if they could just keep them together”. That’s the five sophomore starters in their lineup this year, two of whom went to states, and one who missed the medal stand by a match. Karams’ teams beat Nazareth, Northampton, Bethlehem Catholic, and Phillipsburg in duals, and took Easton to their first State Dual final since 2011 last season. They won the Junior High tournament with a huge contingent of middle schoolers who are all expected to be in Red and Black over the next few winters, and they’re clearly positioned to be the next team in D11. It’s the healthiest the program has been since winning four straight D11 titles in the early 2010s.
The one thing he was missing was snapping Easton’s state champion drought – Mitch Minotti won their last title in 2011, and 13 years was the longest Easton had ever gone without a state champ, dubiously surpassing the 1949-1962 stretch (for reference Easton had 16 champs in the 13 years before 2011). Powell had two finals losses in his last year (2016), Billman had Andrew Balukas make a Cinderella run to finals in 2019, and Karam had Cruise’s loss to Sean Kinney in 2022, but Easton hadn’t been particularly close – and four state finalists in thirteen years qualified as a disaster for the Rovers. This, frankly, was the Jody Karam story at Liberty too, where he had so much team success through the years, but never could quite replicate that on the individual side, with just Andrew Gunning’s 2016 title at heavyweight in his 26 years at Liberty.
Which is what made this weekend so awesome. In Jody’s final competition as a head coach, Nick Salamone, the athlete that was the first real star to believe and stick with him wrestled out of his mind. Every single opponent he faced this weekend ended up with a state medal, making it one of the hardest paths of anybody to a title. He opened with a 2-1 nailbiter, where he needed a reversal and ride out in the third to win without a takedown. He gave up the first takedown to a regional champ in his second match, and was trailing in the second period when he hit a flying cement job in a scramble and pinned him. He comfortably won his semi against the eventual fourth place finisher. Then came the final, against Kavin Muyleart, who absolutely throttled Salamone’s big rival in their opening round match.
Like Jody (who said as much after the match) I felt absolutely awful when Salamone got taken down almost instantly with a really pretty wrist snap, then nearly turned in a Blair ride, and ridden out for the entire first period. It was a bleak start to the match. But Muyleart, I think feeling like he could take Salamone down at will, chose to cut him to start the second period rather than ride him again. That's where Corey Keener's gameplan for the match started to take shape, and Karam noted to the Express that once Nick got back on his feet and got to the plan, all of his nerves subsided. Nick responded in the second by defending that same wrist snap and re-attacking a double, which he very slickly converted into a takedown, and then returned the favor by completely saddling Muyleart for the rest of the period. I’m not sure his belly ever got off the mat. That must have been on Muyleart and his coaches minds in the third period, when he chose neutral rather than pick to go under with a chance to escape and tie the match. The third period was terrifying, with Salamone doing a nice job hand fighting and staying either in on Muyleart’s legs or otherwise out of trouble for the first minute-20. But Muyleart got in on a great shot with about 40 seconds left, which he converted to a near side cradle with Salamone doing a split (it was essentially the Nico Megaludis-Jesse Delgado scramble from NCAA finals however long ago that was), but Salamone had a whizzer over-tied on Muyleart’s near side to prevent the takedown. The FloWrestling announcer wanted a stall or fleeing the mat call for Salamone finding his way out of bounds in the scramble (I was screaming for a fleeing call earlier in the period on Muyleart, so I’m considering that an even trade). Muyleart got in on an even deeper chance with 15 seconds left, but Salamone’s incredible flexibility (he again, was doing a split to keep his back leg away) allowed him to survive the exchange ever so slightly, and get his name on the back wall of the Easton wrestling room, with the slew of legends who have won state titles. Number thirty-six finally happened.
The picture of Karam sobbing in the corner while Salamone dives into the huge section of Easton fans that had made their way down to the section closest to his corner is one that will be an all-timer in Easton history. The program was at it’s darkest place when Jody got hired. That the two people most responsible for bringing it back got to share and celebrate that moment, winning the ultimate prize in PIAA wrestling, was just too poetic. And sending Karam out a winner, with his second state champ, and first at Easton, in his final match as Easton’s head coach is the perfect send-off for the perfect man for this specific job.
